Elizabethan Sea Dogs eBook

The voyage was now ‘made’ in the old sense
of that term; for this prize was ‘the greatest
ship in all Portugal, richly laden, to our Happy Joy.’
The relative values, then and now, are impossible to
fix, because not only was one dollar the equivalent
in most ways of ten dollars now but, in view of the
smaller material scale on which men’s lives were
lived, these ten dollars might themselves be multiplied
by ten, or more, without producing the same effect
as the multiplied sum would now produce on international
affairs. Suffice it to say that the ship was
worth nearly five million dollars of actual cash, and
ten, twenty, thirty, or many more millions if present
sums of money are to be considered relatively to the
national incomes of those poorer days.

But better than spices, jewels, and gold were the
secret documents which revealed the dazzling profits
of the new East-India trade by sea. From that
time on for the next twelve years the London merchants
and their friends at court worked steadily for official
sanction in this most promising direction. At
last, on the 31st of December, 1600, the documents
captured by Drake produced their result, and the East-India
Company, by far the greatest corporation of its kind
the world has ever seen, was granted a royal charter
for exclusive trade. Drake may therefore be said
not only to have set the course for the United States
but to have actually discovered the route leading to
the Empire of India, now peopled by three hundred
million subjects of the British Crown.

So ended the famous campaign of 1587, popularly known
as the singeing of King Philip’s beard.
Beyond a doubt it was the most consummate work of
naval strategy which, up to that time, all history
records.

CHAPTER IX

DRAKE AND THE SPANISH ARMADA

With 1588 the final crisis came. Philip—­haughty,
gloomy, and ambitious Philip, unskilled in arms, but
persistent in his plans—­sat in his palace
at Madrid like a spider forever spinning webs that
enemies tore down. Drake and the English had
thrown the whole scheme of the Armada’s mobilization
completely out of gear. Philip’s well-intentioned
orders and counter-orders had made confusion worse
confounded; and though the Spanish empire held half
the riches of the world it felt the lack of ready
money because English sea power had made it all parts
and no whole for several months together. Then,
when mobilization was resumed, Philip found himself
distracted by expert advice from Santa Cruz, his admiral,
and from Parma, Alva’s successor in the Netherlands.